‘Fashion,’ as Wedgwood recognized, ‘is infinitely superior to merit in many respects…It is plain from a thousand instances that if you have a favourite child you wish the public to fondle & take notice of, you have only to make a choice of proper sponcers. If you are lucky in them no matter what the brat is, black, brown or fair, its fortune is made.’59 And with his ‘sponcers’ Wedgwood started at the top, believing that the greatest in the land would influence the lesser: ‘Few ladies, you know, dare venture at anything out of the common stile ‘till authoris’d by their betters—by the Ladies of superior spirit who set the ton.’60 Queen Charlotte had started him on his way with Queensware; after a queen, who but an empress? In 1770 Catherine the Great had commissioned a Queensware service decorated with wheat husks. Three years later came a greater challenge: she wanted a service for state occasions: a 680-piece dinner service and a 264-piece dessert service, plus tureens, salvers, fruit baskets, ‘glaciers’ (ice-cream bowls) etc. to accompany them.† Each piece was to have on it an image of an actual country house, or a park or garden, or a palace, or even industrial ‘sights’ such as the Plymouth docks or the Bridgewater Canal. The cost was fantastic—not for the manufacture, but for an artist to be sent around the country to make drawings, and then for the 1,200 drawings to be worked up so they could be transferred to the dishes. But Wedgwood was a born publicist, and he had planned a coup de théâtre—he would show the entire service before it was shipped off to Russia, and, whatever he had lost on the manufacture, ‘it would bring an immense number of people of fashion into our Rooms—would fully complete our notoriety to the whole Island, & help us greatly, no doubt, in the sale of our goods, both useful & ornamental. It would confirm the consequence we have attain’d, & increase it, by showing that we are employ’d in a much higher scale than other Manufacturers.’61 His one anxiety was that some of his noble patrons would be offended that their houses were not included, or were put ‘upon a small piece, or not flattering it sufficiently’. To make the event even more exclusive, admission to the showroom would be by ticket. It was all a great success, with the King and Queen of Sweden paying a special visit, as well as Queen Charlotte, Prince Ernst of Mecklenberg, and hordes of the aristocracy. No one was aggrieved to find their great houses represented on some of the smaller dishes; on the contrary they came time and again to point their lasting fame out to friends.62
The difference between Wedgwood and earlier craftsmen who had relied on the nobility and gentry for their livings was that, as far as Wedgwood and Bentley were concerned, the nobility were a means to an end:
The Great People have had these Vases in their Palaces long enough for them to be seen and admired by the Middling Class of People, which Class we know are vastly, I had almost said, infinitely superior, in number to the great, and though a great price was, I believe, at first necessary to make the vases esteemed Ornament for Palaces, that reason no longer exists. Their character is established and the middling People would probably buy quantities of them at a reduced price.63
Once that principle was established, it was not surprising that Wedgwood thought he could sell anything to anyone. In the 1780s his works could not keep up with the retail demand, and he bought in ware that other manufacturers had been unable to sell. He slapped a higher price on it, together with his name, and everything was snatched off the shelves in a fashionable frenzy. It was the ultimate marketing triumph: to sell goods no one else could shift—and at a higher price.
Wedgwood used every possible route to reach the ‘middling People’. There had long been a reluctance for luxury trades in general to advertise in the newspapers, because there was no control over how their advertisements would appear: auctions—of houses, pictures or just household goods—cockfights, draper’s shops, patent medicines, bug-killers, carefully worded advertisements for the ‘removal of obstructions’ (abortifacients), all appeared pell-mell, one after the other, in column after column. The newspapers, meanwhile, were doing their best to make advertisers believe that their pages were the haunts of none but the very finest manufacturers and retailers. In 1757 the Liverpool Chronicle, in its first edition, suggested,
It is not many years since it was thought mean and disreputable, in any tradesmen of worth and credit, to advertise the sales of his commodities in a public Newspaper, but as those apprehensions were founded only on custom, and not on reason, it is become now fashionable for very eminent tradesmen to publish their business, and the peculiar goods wherein they deal, in the News Papers, by way of Advertisement; nor can any one make appear what disgrace there can be in this, for do not the great trading corporations apprize the public of their sales in the public News Papers?64
Naturally, the newspapers would say that: they had a vested interest in advertisers believing them. But many manufacturers could not be swayed. For years Wedgwood and Bentley preferred to use ‘puffs’, articles ostensibly written by the newspaper’s own journalists, but in reality supplied to it by the subject of the piece or his friends. Wedgwood complained to Bentley, ‘There is a most famous puff for Boulton & Fothergill in the St James’s Chronicle of the 9th & for Mr Cox likewise, How the Author could have the assurance to leave us out I cannot conceive. Pray get another article in the next paper to complete the Triumvirate.’65
Wedgwood constantly came up with new marketing and publicity ploys. When he was given permission to copy the early-first-century Barberini vase, recently acquired by the Duchess of Portland (and more commonly known today as the Portland Vase), he took orders for a small run of expensive reproductions, promising his customers that if the results were not satisfactory the purchasers would not be required to pay. This was a good marketing ploy, rather than an attack of nerves—the Great Publicist was saying, ‘The original is almost unreproducible; when I create a good reproduction, therefore, it makes me a great manufacturer, and the vases more valuable.’ This was one small example of his endless marketing ingenuity. He also sent his London agent to collect outstanding payments while carrying new samples, to show rich but dilatory customers what they could have once they had paid up. He made perfectly standard goods seem like limited lines: he warned that his ‘serpent handled antique vases’ should not ‘be seen till the others are all sold, & then raise the price of them 1/ each’; then he countermanded that—instead of just making the price higher, the London showroom should raise the price even further, and ‘never mind their being thought dear, [but] do not keep them open in the rooms, shew them only to the People of Fashion’.66 He pioneered inertia selling, by sending parcels of his goods—some worth as much as £70—to aristocratic families across Europe, spending £20,000 (altogether the equivalent of several